“Stop grading just the code that they turned in. Grade instead, what are the prompts that you used to get here? Also, what are the tests that you provided?… We don't need another essay on Catcher… We don't need another linked list. We've been using the artifact that's produced from that as a proxy for you put in the time and the struggle… It might be more appropriate to just focus on: do we have evidence that you've struggled and learned?”
The Pragmatic Engineer · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
Winters, who sat on the ACM/IEEE computer science curriculum committee, on how assessment should change now that students use AI. He argues that treating all AI use as cheating can't hold, so schools should grade the process rather than the finished artifact.
Transcript
…are the new learning objectives and how do you make that still frictionful in the ways that cause them to think and learn about different things, like almost certainly at a higher level. Right. But like that's actually the key to undergraduate education and curriculum design and assessment. Well,
…Because now you cannot just fully fake it and go away, give it to a friend or just have Claude do it. You're now showing your cognitive ability. The interviewer can push you into uncomfortable, you know, they'll get a gauge of like how expert you are and push you further and further and so on.
Yeah, exactly. And at the undergraduate level, like there is some move towards more oral exams and those sort of things. But also, I think a really simple solution is stop grading just the outcome. Focus on the process. Right. Like even if you don't come up with wildly harder. Assignments for assessment. Stop grading just the code that they turned in. Grade instead, what are the prompts that you used to get here? Also, what are the tests that you provided? Like, how did you make sure that this thing is actually doing what you need it to do? And when you start focusing on the process that got you there instead of just the outcome, I think not only CS, but most disciplines, right? Like, we've been using, go write a new essay on Catcher in the Rye. Like, we don't need another essay on Catcher, right? Go write a new linked list. We don't need another linked list. We've been using the artifact that's produced from that as a proxy for you put in the time and the struggle and like faced the friction that we assume that you now have learned something. It might be more appropriate to just focus on: do we have evidence that you've struggled and learned? Turn in the whole package, right?
Curriculums are designed by committees, which is for a good reason. But if you had Titus's software engineering school where you could yourself put together the curriculum and study course for an undergrad course of, let's say, three to four years, how would it look like right now? And we're…
Yeah. So I think the first course, like first semester, starts unaided by AI. Like we need to get you through at least the level that you can read code and have a vague idea of what's going on, like can understand control flow and those sorts of things. I think there's some really interesting…
I want to get opinionated at that. Yeah.
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